Monday 11 May 2020

My brain is a bad friend.

I think it was Deborah Frances-White who did a skit on 'The Guilty Feminist' podcast in which she imagined that the negative voice inside her head was her psychopathic room-mate. It sounded like a thriller. No person would ever speak to another human like that, let alone someone they loved and cared about.

I remembered this the other day when I was imagining what it would be like if I said the horrible things I can say to myself to my friends. The result would be that I would have approximately zero friends afterwards and it would be completely understandable. Imagine, for example, if a friend came to me straight after a breakup and I said "Well, of course this means that you will never, ever find love again and you will suffer with this heartache for the rest of your life. Also, you must have done something to deserve it because you are probably not worthy of being loved." Rightly so that friend would likely back away slowly and never return.

The thing is, not only would I never, ever say that to a friend, or even a stranger, I wouldn't actually believe it. I have complete and utter faith that every single person in my life is not only worthy of love, happiness and success in whatever form that might take but also that they will inevitably find those things throughout their lives. I believe so wholeheartedly in my friends being deserving of love that I will personally be the sole provider if things should ever come to that.

Why, then, is it so easy to believe and say the complete opposite to myself?

As I was writing this my dad sent me a blog post by Mary O'Malley about the concept of things being "unfair". This line seemed particularly apt: "But then I remembered that our minds have been trained to struggle and, instead of contracting, I began to laugh." And then, "There is absolutely nothing that your mind does that you need to judge." My dad didn't know that I was sat in my room writing this blog post, so perhaps he is secretly telepathic.

Of course the voice in my head is a harsher critic of and a worse friend than I would ever be to another person but the key is probably in recognising this. I have set a challenge for myself that the next bad thought I think about myself I will ask, "would you say that to or believe that of your sister? your friend? a girl you met drunk in the pub toilets?" and when the answer is inevitably "no" I will, like Mary O'Malley, simply laugh. And those kindly, gentle, beautiful things I would say to the people I love I will repeat to myself because, like everyone else, my feisty little head deserves that too.

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